Jose Gervasio Artigas

Jose Gervasio Artigas (19 June 1764-23 September 1850) was a national hero of Uruguay who led Cisplatine resistance to the Unitarios of Argentina during the Argentine Civil War and against the Portuguese-Brazilian invasions of 1811, 1816, and 1820.

Biography
Jose Gervasio Artigas was born in Montevideo, Uruguay on 19 June 1764, the grandson of immigrants from Spain, Argentina, and the Canary Islands. He joined the Spanish Army in 1797 with the rank of lieutenant and fought against the British during the Napoleonic Wars, defending Buenos Aires in 1806 and being captured during the fall of Montevideo. He was promoted to Captain in 1809, and, a year later, he supported the overthrow of Spanish rule in South America. Artigas became the leader of a guerrilla army which captured many villages in the Banda Oriental and fought against Spanish royalist forces. In 1811, the Royalists summoned the aid of Portugal to assist them in restoring order to Uruguay, whose capital of Montevideo was on the verge of falling to the patriots. Argentina made peace with the Royalist leader Francisco Javier de Elio, recognizing him as Viceroy of the Rio de la Plata, betraying the Uruguayan revolutionaries. Artigas led a massive exodus from Bando Oriental to Salto Chico, where the Argentine supreme director Gervasio Antonio de Posadas placed a bounty on Artigas' head. Artigas escaped when Carlos Maria de Alvear captured Montevideo, but, in 1815, he liberated Montevideo from the Argentine forces and agreed to join the other Argentine provinces in forming a federal government. However, the growing power of the Federales worried the centralist Argentine government and the monarchist Portuguese government, and, in 1816, Portugal invaded Uruguay with the goal of destroying Artigas and his revolution. On 20 January 1817, Montevideo fell to Carlos Frederico Lecor's Portuguese forces, and Artigas was captured before escaping to Paraguay in September 1820. He died after a long exile in 1850 at the age of 86, asking for a horse so that he could die sitting on the sattle like a gaucho. Artigas, a staunch democrat and federalist, was considered to be a national hero by all Uruguayans.